They are online Salute from February 29th you will find something new, useful. We called it “Hospitals of Excellence”, and it is a database built with very rigorous criteria to give a “rating” to Italian treatment centers. It is not a “pass and fail”, but an evaluation of those who pass. And it wasn’t us who did it, but the German Institute for Quality and Finance (ITQF), set up by the publisher Burda-Verlag, which has been giving report cards to companies for twenty years.
Good, mediocre, insufficient
Of course, the care of citizens is a commitment of the NHS and we don’t like to define those who provide healthcare services as “businesses”, but the reality of Italian healthcare today is that of a puzzle of “service providers” – public, private, affiliated – which, although all subject to the Ministry of Health and the Regions, go in no particular order and behave extremely differently from each other. We know that many do things right; we know that others get by in mediocrity often providing a service that is too questionable; we know that many others are not up to the task entrusted to them.
Festival Salute 2023. Best hospital, the database that helps you choose
A compass to orient yourself
We didn’t create the rankings you will find on Salute, but the method convinced us and we decided to publish them. Of course they have limitations, but they provide a good framework. They are based on the National Plan outcomes, which every year Agenas draws up to evaluate the interventions to which Italians have undergone, on questionnaires filled out by companies and on “reputational” interviews.
Why did we do it? Citizens are disoriented: between so-called places of excellence, large hospitals of ancient prestige that are perhaps damaged, nursing homes that have never been transparently evaluated in front of citizens, small and targeted structures that work well… the most frequent question after a diagnosis is: ” but where am I going?” “Which doctor should I follow?”. The answer should be given by the general practitioner, who should be the guide of the patients. But he almost never does. And so the rounds on Dr Google begin, the chats of improvised and perhaps paid experts, the botched advice. We don’t think we can remedy this chaos with our rankings. Just to provide a compass to orient yourself.
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